{"id":1115,"date":"2025-11-13T12:55:43","date_gmt":"2025-11-13T17:55:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pbump.net\/o\/?p=1115"},"modified":"2025-11-13T13:15:01","modified_gmt":"2025-11-13T18:15:01","slug":"the-subtext-to-the-surge-in-young-women-saying-they-hope-to-leave-the-u-s","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pbump.net\/o\/the-subtext-to-the-surge-in-young-women-saying-they-hope-to-leave-the-u-s\/","title":{"rendered":"The subtext to the surge in young women saying they hope to leave the U.S."},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Polling, like anything else that involves human beings, is not strictly analytical. There is an emotional aspect to the results, a natural side effect of asking people how they feel about candidates or issues. That tendency is exaggerated in the current political moment (as the great Ariel Edwards-Levy has written<\/a>), when partisanship runs high and polling offers Americans a non-Election-Day opportunity to express their enthusiasm or distaste for what\u2019s unfolding in our country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is through that lens that we should consider new polling from Gallup<\/a> indicating that 2 in 5 young women would like to permanently move out of the country. But we should not consider those numbers solely<\/em> through that lens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Gallup finding is striking, if not sudden. The pollster has been asking a version of this question since 2008, finding that young people were consistently-but-only-slightly more likely to express interest in moving out of the U.S. than were older Americans and Americans overall. Since 2016, though \u2014 that is, since the year that Donald Trump first won election to the White House \u2014 the percentage of young women who\u2019ve expressed that desire has surged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It\u2019s useful to remember that we\u2019re not talking about one group of people who are changing their minds. A woman aged 18 to 44 in 2025 was not necessarily a woman in that age group in 2016, and vice versa. This shift likely reflects both an expressed decline in enthusiasm for the U.S. among women and an increase in the number of women who never would have expressed enthusiasm in the first place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gallup also found that there was a clear connection between interest in moving out of the U.S. and dissatisfaction with the country\u2019s leadership. From 2008 until 2016, there wasn\u2019t really a difference between those who approved and those who disapproved of the country\u2019s leaders when it came to wanting to leave the U.S. Since then, though, a gap has emerged \u2014 one that is clearly tied to Trump\u2019s role in government. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2017, there was a 12-point gap in interest in leaving between those who approved and those who disapproved of the country\u2019s leadership. That fell to 7 points in 2021, the first year of Joe Biden\u2019s presidency \u2014 presumably in part because there were fewer young people frustrated with the country\u2019s new leadership. This year, though, the gap surged to 25 points, with very few of those who approve of the country\u2019s leadership expressing an interest in leaving while more than a quarter of those who disapprove saying they just might.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Again, they probably won\u2019t; it is much easier to say you will move out of the country (or, uh, out of a city<\/a>) than it is to actually do so. Put another way, the moving-away question is actually mostly a measure of that disapproval of leadership than of actual intent to move.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But it isn’t only<\/em> that. It is also clearly a measure of how a large segment of the population feels as though America has failed them and \u2014\u00a0importantly \u2014\u00a0that they don’t have an obvious way to reverse that shift<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gallup also looked at the level of confidence different age\/gender groupings had in American institutions like the military and elections. Since 2015, one year pre-Trump, confidence among older men jumped by 15 points. Among young women, though, it fell by 17 points.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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There is a theoretical solution built into the system. Americans can vote out politicians who are driving that eroded confidence and replacing them with politicians who can increase it. The solution, in other words, is democracy. And there exists an institution predicated on aggregating power to defeat Republicans like Trump: the Democratic Party.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Data compiled from the American National Election Studies poll shows that views of the Democratic Party among young women have dropped significantly over the past 20 years. In 2024, the most recent point at which the ANES poll was conducted, the average measure of warmth toward the Democratic Party fell below 50 (on a zero-to-100 scale) for the first time on record. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Since 2008, the average rating of the Democratic Party has fallen 13 points among young women (and 15 points among young men). If young women felt as though the Democratic Party was fulfilling its mandate to counterbalance the decline of American institutions, it’s probably safe to assume that those numbers would look quite different.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Again, American democracy is dependent on the idea that losses (and victories) are temporary, that power is shared with your ideological opponents over time and that you are only ever one election away from seeing the nation’s forward progress lurch back onto the path that you prefer. If, however, Americans feel as though that won’t<\/em> happen, that democracy doesn’t provide any such corrective and that losses are not temporary setbacks, confidence in institutions will collapse alongside confidence in the experiment itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is certainly true that the interest expressed by young women in leaving the country is mostly a reflection of their dissatisfaction with the country’s leadership. But it’s probably also in part a measure of something deeper and more worrisome: concern that America no longer effectively provides the sort of electoral checks and balances that it’s supposed to. That there won’t be any further correction to the country’s course.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Photo: No Kings protesters. (Susan Ruggles\/Flickr used under Creative Commons license)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Polling, like anything else that involves human beings, is not strictly analytical. There is an emotional aspect to the results, a natural side effect of asking people how they feel about candidates or issues. That tendency is exaggerated in the current political moment (as the great Ariel Edwards-Levy has written),…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1122,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1115","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pbump.net\/o\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pbump.net\/o\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pbump.net\/o\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pbump.net\/o\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pbump.net\/o\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1115"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.pbump.net\/o\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1115\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1126,"href":"https:\/\/www.pbump.net\/o\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1115\/revisions\/1126"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pbump.net\/o\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1122"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pbump.net\/o\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pbump.net\/o\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pbump.net\/o\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}